Waffle Iron Dinners

Thursday nights are always a tough night in our home for family dinners. The fridge has thinned out from last weekends shopping trip and we have eaten up all our leftovers. Mentally, we are ready for the weekend and don't feel like cooking anything substantial.

Our solution: pull out the waffle iron, it can do much more that make basic breakfast waffles and is a snap to clean!

There are many recipes out there for Zucchini Waffles, but we encourage you to stack ours up against the rest. We find that the other recipes produce a soggy product, while ours have a crunchy exterior and fluffy interior!

Veggie Waffles
-2 cups of grated vegetable (zucchini, sweet potato, parsnip) feel free to mix a few veggies. The waffles pictured above are made with zucchini. Note*: when grating the vegetables, make sure they are in smaller pieces (about 1 inch in length maximum).
-1 egg
-1/4 cup of milk
-1/4 cup of Parmesan cheese
-1/2 cup of brown rice flour
-1/4 cup of finely diced onion
-1 tsp salt
-cooking spray if your waffle is not a non-stick

Heat your waffle iron on high.

Put your grated veggies in a sieve and cover with paper towel. Push down on the veggies trying to rid them from as much water as possible. (Some veggies, like parsnips, may not leak much water).

In a small bowl whisk together the milk and egg. Then add the Parmesan cheese, brown rice flour and salt. Mix until combined. Lastly, stir in the onion and veggies.

Spoon the batter into your waffle iron and cook until done. Make the waffles any size you want (larger waffles will take a bit longer to cook). Cool on wire wrack.

When ready to eat, pop your veggie waffles in the toaster and toast on medium-high to get crunchy! Serve with applesauce and plain yogurt.

Boost Your Breakfast with Veggies!

Cooking with veggies is our specialty. Not only do we create new products based around servings of veggies, but we also cook this way at home. We challenged ourselves for an entire week to boost everything we made/prepared with veggies! While lunch and dinner are easy meals to get in those veggies, we thought we would share a few unexpected breakfast ideas you can easily make at home.

Take our 1 week veggie boost challenge! Here are some breakfast ideas:

-pumpkin pancakes, freeze and eat on school days

-yogurt parfait with pureed carrots, we especially liked this with vanilla yogurt

-oatmeal with beet puree mixed in at the end

-toast with cinnamon-sugar and pureed yam spread

-breakfast burrito with a broccoli-egg and cheese scramble

-homefries with herbs and riced cauliflower (sauté potatoes until almost cooked and throw riced   cauliflower in the pan for the last 5 minutes)

-if you can get your hands on dehydrated carrots or sweet potatoes try steeping it with your tea!

What's In Our Lunchbox This Week

Here is what we will be sending in the lunchbox this week

1.    Polenta Fries- great warm or cold

This recipe is easy to add veggies to – simply stir in some broccoli or carrot puree for crispy fingers that will keep your tot going all afternoon.

2.    Roasted Veggie "Chips"

Great side to any lunch protein/sandwich. Cut raw veggies into thin rounds (sweet potatoes, zucchini or even parsnip), toss in olive oil and bake on 425 until golden, flipping halfway through bake.

3.    Riced Cauliflower Bowl

Grind down raw cauliflower until small couscous like consistency and replace half the rice with riced cauliflower in a yummy rice bowl with avocado, cheese and a little salsa.

4.    Zucchini Waffles

There are a ton of recipes on the internet to follow. We like to mix parmesan with the zucchini which helps make them a little crunchy!

5.   No-Bake Carrot Balls- something sweet

Figs or dates hold these together, loaded with shredded carrot (or parsnip or beet) and tossed in some unsweetened coconut for a tasty afternoon snack.

Reinvented Fried Rice

Reinventing kid food is what we do best! We take pride in providing busy parents like you the Peas of Mind that comes with feeding your little ones all natural, veggie infused meals that take minutes to prepare.  This month we’re reinventing your family’s favorite take-out dinner: fried rice! 

 As usual we’re shaking things up by packing this dish with whole veggies while slashing the fat.  We’ve even replaced rice with quinoa (pronounced keen-wah), which wows with 7 grams of COMPLETE protein per serving! Not only is this meal quick and easy to prepare, if the quinoa is cooked a head of time, it’s a one pot meal which makes clean up a cinch!

INGREDIENTS:

About 4 cups cooked quinoa, al dente

1/2 onion, small dice

1 large carrot, small dice

4 florets cauliflower, chopped

4 leaves kale (or cabbage or other leafy green), stems removed and shredded

1/2 cup frozen peas

about 1 tsp chopped ginger

1 tablespoon sesame oil

juice of 1 lemon

2 tablespoons tamari or soy sauce, to taste (or substitute salt)

sesame seeds, for garnish 

METHOD

Cook quinoa according to directions. Bring to boil, then turn off heat and let sit covered while you begin stir-fry. It should be fully cooked but not soft or mushy.

Heat sesame oil over high heat. Add onion, carrot, cauliflower and ginger. Stir-fry about five minutes, until onion are translucent and cauliflower begins to turn golden brown. Add kale and cooked quinoa and stir-fry for two minutes to combine. Add frozen peas, lemon juice and tamari and stir to combine. Cover to steam about three to four minutes over low heat. Once peas are defrosted and bright green, taste for seasoning. Serve in bowls and garnish with sesame seeds (which are this month's food of the MONTH, find out why here).

Makes 4 servings

This recipea is not only packed with veggies and protein, it is unbelievably quick to make. In the time that you would call a take out restaurant and pick up the food, this reinvented fried rice will be ready to eat. So throw out those take out menus and breath a sigh of relief knowing that your kiddos are being nourished with this month's Recipea!

Shocking Sugary Stats

We all know that too much sugar is a bad thing.  We know that processed sugar is just empty calories that can lead to obesity, tooth decay and other major and minor health problems.  But did you know that according to the USDA economic research service, the average child under twelve eats 49 POUNDS of sugar every year?  This means that there are five and six-year-olds out there eating their weight in sugar each year!  Here at Peas of Mind, we want to help you ensure that your child is not within this statistic. Check out these three easy tips that will help you and your family drastically lower your daily sugar intake.

1. Steer clear of the empty calories of sugary drinks by making your own homemade soda's, juices and spritzers.  Water is always the best liquid but we know this may not be what your child is craving.  Instead of juice from concentrate, freshly squeeze oranges or if you have a high powered blender, combine your favorite fruits and veggies and strain using a cheese cloth (much less expensive then buying a juicer).  Make a homemade soda by combining seltzer water with a dash of fresh squeezed OJ or a squeeze of lemon and a dollop of agave.  If your child has a major sweet tooth, make the spritzer to their sweetness liking then lower the amount of agave or OJ you put in the seltzer every day which will eventually change his pallet.
2. Making homemade desserts may sound like a large task but why not spend an hour on Sunday baking with the kids and getting them involved with their food?  You can easily lower the amount of sugar in a recipe by replacing the processed sugar with natural sweeteners like beet puree, applesauce and mashed sweet potatoes.  This will not only give the dessert the desired sweetness your kids crave, you’ll be infusing the sweet-treat with an extra dose of vitamins and minerals!  Check out our delicious, quick and veggie infused corn muffin recipea or our sweet potato cinnamon rolls recipea.
3. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again.  Read labels! Children should be eating between 12-16 grams of refined sugar per day so take that into account when buying packaged foods.  If the granola bar that you’re about to buy has 12 grams of sugar in a serving, put it down because that’s almost a days worth of sugar in one bar.  Here at Peas of Mind, we believe that it’s up to YOU, the parent, as to how much sugar/salt goes into your child’s food.  This means that we add very little to our products, allowing you to make the decision on how much sugar your child eats. Our Peas of Pie, Veggie Wedgies and Nuggets all have less sugar then leading brands so fill your freezer up with these delicious meals and give yourself some Peas of mind when it comes to your child’s sugar intake.  
   

Garden Grown Nuggets

Did you hear the good news?  Peas of Mind is now offering a NEW product! We have added Garden Grown Nuggets to our delicious and nutritious line of frozen food for kids.  Here at Peas of Mind, we reinvent the classics! We take those unhealthy dishes kids love and make a nutritious version the whole family will enjoy. 

This time last year we thought to ourselves: what are we missing in our line of frozen snacks and meals for kids? We have our Peas of Pie pizza which is loaded with veggies (that are unseen to the veggie-phobic eye.)  We turned nutrient rich vegetables (like carrots, broccoli and cauliflower) into guilt-free French fries. And we have even infused fresh baked pull-a-part bread with a full dose of veggies.  What classic kid food are we missing?  

Then it hit us like a ton of broccoli florets: NUGGETS!  I’m sure you can attest that your kids LOVE nuggets and we have realized that those darn things just aren’t going away.  So we started the process of reinventing this fried, saturated fat-filled chicken nugget by turning it into a garden-grown nugget that both moms AND kids will love.

We spent hours in the test kitchens whipping up different versions of our all-natural nugget until we had a version that truly gave us Peas of Mind.  This perfectly peas-full nugget is loaded with broccoli, carrots, tofu and brown rice, making it both vegetarian and gluten-free.  We then decided to give our customers more choices and came up with three flavors: Original, BBQ (which are both VEGAN) and Cheesy!  One serving of our Garden Grown Nuggets is:

• packed with vitamins and minerals
• has less sodium then the leading brands
• contains one FULL serving of veggies 
• includes 7 grams of complete protein 
• gluten free
• lower in fat than the leading brands

So get ready to devour the first gluten-free and vegan nugget! They will be on shelves of Super Target in May, in Sprouts Farmers Market in June and on their way to a shelf near you soon! (Find them in the freezer section)

Peas of Mind's complete product line

The power of Elmo

Here at Peas of Mind, our mission is to get kids to eat their veggies (as well as give parents a little Peas of Mind about the food they are feeding their children).  We reinvent those unhealthy dishes kids love, like fries and pizza and infuse them with TONS of veggies, making nutritious versions of kid's favorites, the whole family will enjoy.  With that being said, we love hearing about great ways to get kids to eat their vegetables, which was why we were so intrigued by the Elmo Study.  The Elmo study was a study done that compared children’s choice of broccoli versus chocolate, “unsurprisingly, 78% of the kids chose the chocolate, and just 22% chose the broccoli. But when an Elmo sticker was placed on the broccoli and an image of a generic cartoon character was stuck on the chocolate, half of the children chose the broccoli. 

This got us wondering, do you have any tricks up your sleeves when it comes to enticing your children to choose broccoli over chocolate? We knew a mom who called all vegetables “sports candy” and her son just loved his “sports candy.”  He would gobble down, Brussels sprouts (his favorite variety of “sports candy”) because it made him strong, powerful and ready to play his favorite sport, soccer.   Share your stories with us and let other parents know how you get their kiddos to scarf down broccoli, brussel sprouts and beets. 

Find out more about the Elmo Study here:
http://foodpsychology.cornell.edu/outreach/brand.html